The Placebo Effect

Even more new science about the ear and the brain ---coming in, just today.

What it says is ’we still don’t know how this ear/brain thing works’.

And someone wants to say that ’blind testing is king?’

That’s it’s all charlatans and palcebo, our imaginations?

that we have to submit to the just the electrical measurements being the arbiter of all things heard?

Are you kidding me?

To point, we still don’t know exactly how we hear, or how well we hear, and that there are variations in hearing quality and capcities that equal the range of intelligence between individuals. Meaning ... the range can be as high as 1 million to 1 (as compared to the human IQ range, re cognitive capacity but especially cognitive SPEED, or rate, over time....)

You can test the below thing on yourself easily.

One pair of cheap foam earplugs. ride the bus or drive your car downtown and then get out at the mall or a big station, etc, and then in the middle of that space (union square, times square, etc)...remove the earplugs.

You will feel your hearing sort out the noise from signal. you will feel it cut out the subsonics of your heartbeat, and the rush of blood in your veins, and so on. It will remove the thrum of air conditioning, buses driving by, subways, and other subsonics. You will feel it tune out that noise and tune in to just the sounds that are relevant to you.

What happened is that your hearing shut down and relaxed it’s processing and filters, as you walked around with the ear plugs in (10-20 minutes). Your hearing mechanism will assume the correct filtering scenarios over the course of 1.5- to 3 seconds, after you pull the earplugs out. You will literally be able to catch it, for some of you, the first time...consciously.

Note that this is automatic, subconscious animal level stuff that is out of your explicit control. But that does not mean that you cannot concentrate and filter. You are sporting the most complex and capable computer known to humanity, and you tend to use it. all day. every day. moving muscles, operating your lungs, eyeballs, and so on. and, thank the gods, you can learn. some much much faster or slower than others and in different ways. so our individual hearing vs the next person is not even close to being the same in level of quality OR type/nature.

Essentially, if you can’t hear it or if I can’t hear it, that does not automatically mean that the next person can’t. Remember. as varied in capacities in the brain tied to their individual hearing as there is variation in intelligence.
Most importantly, if you can’t hear all these things audiophiles speak about, you DEFINITELY don’t get to design or demand any tests or regimen. It should be obvious as to the why of it.

If it is still not obvious... then the idea of you being excluded from enforcing or deciding or demanding test regimen and type is REALLY way off the end off the limbs and out in the weeds of foolishness and incapacity.

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Researchers move one step closer to understanding how the brain processes multiple conversations at once

Conducting a discussion in a noisy place can be challenging when other conversations and background noises interfere with our ability to focus attention on our conversation partner. How the brain deals with the abundance of sounds in our environments, and prioritizes among them, has been a topic of debate among cognitive neuroscientists for many decades.

Often referred to as the "Cocktail Party Problem," its central question focuses on whether we can absorb information from a few speakers in parallel, or whether we are limited to understanding speech from only one speaker at a time.

One reason this question is difficult to answer is that attention is an internal state not directly accessible to researchers. By measuring the brain activity of listeners as they attempt to focus attention on a single speaker and ignore a task-irrelevant one, we can gain insight into the internal operations of attention and how these competing speech stimuli are represented and processed by the brain.

In a study recently published in the journal eLife, researchers from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University set out to explore whether words and phrases are identified linguistically or just represented in the brain as "acoustic noise," with no further linguistic processing applied.

"Answering this question helps us better understand the capacity and limitations of the human speech-processing system. It also gives insight into how attention helps us deal with the multitude of stimuli in our environments—helping to focus primarily on the task-at-hand, while also monitoring what is happening around us," says Dr. Elana Zion Golumbic, of Bar-Ilan University’s Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who led the study.

Zion Golumbic and team measured brain activity of human listeners as they listened to two speech stimuli, each presented to a different ear. Participants were instructed to focus their attention on the content of one speaker, and to ignore the other.

The researchers found evidence that the so-called unattended speech, generated from background conversations and noise, is processed at both acoustic and linguistic levels, with responses observed in auditory and language-related areas of the brain.

Additionally, they found that the brain response to the attended speaker in language-related brain regions was stronger when it "competed" with other speech (in comparison to non-speech competition). This suggests that the two speech-inputs compete for the same processing resources, which may underlie the increased listening effort required for staying focused when many people talk at once.

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So... you want people to be forced to deal with blind testing and science has just shown that they have no idea what the F* we are testing for (FOR DECADES!!), and that they have no access to the primary mechanism and it can’t be measured except via people listening and reporting back.

Oh yeah...the big central thing in science that the measurement people have real problems with.

Observation. In science, OBSERVATION IS KING. It starts with ’I observe’, and goes from there.

I observe. I hear something. (Or hear an absence of).

So, you’ve got a component to the test that you can’t put a number on, and you can’t get rid of it by saying that if ’it can’t be measured, it can’t be real.’

To try to force that on the complex equation would literally equate with a form of insolent self forced retardation of the most blinkered kind...and to make everyone else conform to those demands.. a blinkering of the self or an incapacity to reach the complexity of the question at hand.

where one would invalidate themselves from being involved in the question, at all. Simply by opening one’s mouth and making blind testing demands and to be saying that numbers are all that counts.

What insanity.... and that’s audio science review and audioholics, in a nutshell.

Bent and distorted with inherent limitations which are grossly visible to all who can see...

And for the love of god, please grow up enough to keep it to yourselves. Thank you.

No.

Just No.

One can’t apply the idea of ’knowing’ to the equation, in the attempt to solve it... if most of one part of the equation is an unknown.

And the unknown is the human hearing mechanism.

We know that this quandary remains unsolved.

So to call ’placebo, they’re all fooling themselves’, is just cr*p. Cr*p at a blind projecting level that is pretty well wholly anti-science.

The equation keeps changing almost every day, if one is paying attention.

This just in, literally today:

Research challenges decades-old understanding of how we hear sound

"The research group, led by Professor Anders Fridberger, previously discovered that the tectorial membrane functions as a reservoir for calcium ions, which are needed for the hair cells to convert the sound-evoked vibrations into nerve signals. The researchers followed the motion of the calcium ions in the ducts, and their results suggest that the calcium ions flow through the ducts to the hair cells. This may explain how the hair cells obtain the large amounts of calcium ions needed for their function. The study has also shown that the stereocilia on the inner and outer hair cells are bent by the tectorial membrane in similar ways. The next step of the research will be to understand in more detail how the calcium ions are transported, and identify the protein or proteins that make up the newly discovered calcium ducts.

"Our results allow us to describe a mechanism for how hearing functions, that is incompatible with the model that has been accepted for more than fifty years. The classic illustrations in the textbooks showing the hearing organ and how it functions must be updated. The mathematical models used in research to study hearing should also be updated to include these new findings," says Pierre Hakizimana.

New information about how hearing functions may eventually contribute to the development of cochlear implants, hearing aids that are inserted into the cochlea and use electrical stimulation to restore hearing for children and adults.

"Cochlear implants are an amazing solution for treating hearing loss, but they can be improved. A deeper understanding of how the inner hair cells are stimulated by sounds is important to optimize how cochlear implants stimulate the auditory nerve," says Pierre Hakizimana."

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Where this sort of revelation goes on and on and on, if one bothers to do the legwork of what science actually requires... if they want to get into the weeds of what we hear, how we hear, what audio reproduction means, how to improve it, what audiophiles say they hear, what the limitations of measurement are, and so on.

It is a MASSIVE subject, with complex unknowns and knowns that have deep complexities and aren’t really capable of being resolved as those ’knowns’ are deeply colored and shifting about due to their connectivity to the unknowns.

Science says one can’t declare it all being placebo... as that would be an emotional decision with limited depth and would be wholly anti science and more political and a personal internal struggle involving limitations of the given individual self... which is then selfishly writ large upon the outer world.

and some wander into hot retorts of projected fantasy about other people's thoughts on the nature of reality and testing it.

Ok, phew… One of the biggest challenges in all human thought is that we understand there is some kind of objective reality and that we can, in most cases, consistently measure it; and there’s also the subjective experience of that objective reality that our physical bodies construct, our consciousness experiences, and is very similar but not exactly the same from person to person.

Much of the history of philosophy and science is about trying to determine “where is the line” between the objective and the subjective. In fact, it’s safe to argue wars have been fought over this divide. Consider this thread! Thus the philosophical and scientific fields of Philosophy of Mind, Neuroscience and Behaviorism, and all that flows from them.

ah no. we can’t prove the existence of objective reality. there is no mechanism for that. the only thing that logic can prove or provide.. is that subjective reality is the core of all experience or observation by the observer.

And it can go no further.

thankfully, that’s a good thing. as we can’t advance if objectivity is in charge, due to the how the human mind works.

It gets into negative proofing and similar mindsets and tries to make itself safe and in the know of things..and puts dogmatism in charge. it’s why religion worked so well as the standard-bearer for so many thousands of years. It’s the monkey origins of the underlying mechanism of self realization or self reflection. Religion loves dogmatism and objective reality, as it goes circular really really fast (due to expressive limits in the face of unknowns) and is useful for fencing people in. Stop human thought today! be wholly objective in all analysis! Meet your own ass today!

Objectivity is an exercise in logic, nothing more. Properly handled it can be safe and very very useful in the progress of humanity. Improperly handled, it kills all around it.

this fundamental point about the animal origins and coloration of all possible avenues of conscious thought, is what gave the renaissance men of the early 1700’s the great idea of creating the vocational slot of engineering.

where rote training methods came into being along with formalized academia in all that... and poof!...engineering came into being (over some 20-40 years).

This is the only way they found they could create an army of useful people out of the complexities that physics was unfolding to them. As the bulk of humanity wasn’t going to be getting into the weeds of the objectivity/subjectivity problem --any time soon. Literally not wired for it. Such folks invariably have no idea what the question of consciousness means, and generally have to look it up in a book ....and then make a mess out of the analysis anyway.

So the renaissance folks of the time... understanding that there is no feasible group mind fix/change/repair (or an individual one outside of one-on-one Buddhism, etc), licked humanity’s mind and brain... and stuck it to the wholly illiterate television (passive unthinking observation and taking in of things) of objectivity - in a way that made these mindsets useful in building out the modern world.

Seriously. That’s how engineering came to be. In Bavaria. by the mid-late 1700’s it was pretty well functional and formalized and worked so well that the rest of the western world adopted it.

this is why Germany still has the best technical schools. They started the whole thing.

It’s also why a negative proofing objective engineering mindset has no place whatsoever in any science discussion unless they take their mindset and invert it and mentally move to proper science, and stay away from dogmatic texts that try to dictate reality to the art of scientific exploration.

As that act, that set of demands, that mindset norm of the vocation of engineering, is literally anti-science. All those scientific laws in engineering don’t exist in actual functional science. Science has only theories and relies on the observer as the fundamental, in order to take humanity forward.

Where OF COURSE this is not the entire package. Dissing it and picking what I say apart to try and dwell on some small nit and trying to blow it up into something bigger.. as some sort of method of disarming the discourse...is merely an act of desperation.

I await the retorts of objective desperation. For they will come, no doubt.